Planned Serendipity: American Travelers and the Transatlantic Voyage in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries‪.‬

In a 1903 biography of William Wetmore Story (1819-1895), an expatriate sculptor from Boston who lived most of his life in Italy, the author Henry James (1843-1916) commented on what he believed nineteenth-century American travelers abroad had contributed to the United States in the twentieth century: "The dawn of American consciousness of the complicated world." (1) Thirty years later growing numbers of Americans continued to make their own voyages across the Atlantic, and experienced their own "dawns of consciousness." Mount Holyoke College student Sarah (Sally) Johnston wrote to her family about her first sighting of Europe at dawn from aboard the SS Paris in 1938: "We got up about 4:30 a.m. and watched us come into Plymouth Harbor about 5:30 a.m.... We stayed up on deck for ages, freezing to death, but watching the sunrise come over the hills of the harbor.... It was very lovely and exciting, and in spite of being very cold the whole thing was well worth the lack of sleep." (2) Unfortunately, that "dawn," until very recently, has remained largely obscured from the view of American historiography. One of the most enduring obstacles to appreciating and taking seriously the pleasures of travel, including the transatlantic voyage, is the habit of American exceptionalism--an age-old disposition to see America as a new, fresh, democratic and "reformed" alternative to the entrenched ways of an hierarchical, aristocratic, and corrupt "Old World." Some critics of exceptionalism have described it as virulently parochial: "the cognitive complement of an aggressive, implacable mode of collective [national] solidarity." (3) Although many Victorians like Henry James roundly criticized exceptionalism in private correspondence as well as in published writings, the exceptionalist position certainly gained a second wind after Americans' disappointment with World War I and its aftermath. Intellectual icons such as Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) sneered at the European interests of elite Victorians, condemning them for abandoning an "organic" American aesthetic--as if creativity could or should respect national boundaries. (4)